The Struggle over the Sting Ray

Corvette patron saint Zora Arkus-Duntov and GM design chief Bill Mitchell faced off in the early 1960s over who ruled the Corvette roost. The outcome of that battle defines the plastic two-seater of today.

JERRY BURTON

Jul 1, 2002

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The Corvette has always been about ego and power, on the part of its owners as well as its creators. One of the more legendary battles in this respect took place in the early 1960s between design staff chief Bill Mitchell and Corvette engineer Zora Arkus-Duntov over control of the shape and drivetrain configuration of the Corvette Sting Ray, the first all-new Corvette since 1953. Now, in this modified excerpt from Jerry Burton's recently published biography, Zora Arkus-Duntov: The Legend Behind Corvette, we find that the Sting Ray was not exactly the car Duntov wanted to build.

Zora's quest to make his mark at GM would extend, inevitably, to creating his own Corvette. Despite the lack of any real authority, he had already exerted a major influence on the existing car. Little by little, his project assignments for engineers Maurice Olley, Ed Cole, and Harry Barr had yielded a Corvette that Zora proudly deemed "a dog no longer." The 1961 and 1962 models represented significant performance increases, with more power thanks to a standard 250-hp 327, and as much as 360 horsepower on tap via a fuel-injected version. Despite more guts and a new ducktail rear end, the basic chassis and layout remained unchanged from 1953, including an unsophisticated solid rear axle. In Zora's eyes, that represented a severe limitation to the Corvette's performance potential.

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Duntov knew the Corvette needed an all-new design, and he had one in mind-a machine that represented everything he had learned about engineering in his 50-plus years. Based on his experiences with the CERV I (Chevrolet Engineering Research Vehicle I), a provocative open-wheel race car, and the Q Corvette, a concept pushed by then Chevrolet chief engineer Ed Cole that called for a transaxle just like that of today's C5 Corvette, Duntov saw the opportunity to build a mid-engined machine that would rank among the world's finest sports cars at any price.

But the keys to the Corvette kingdom at General Motors were not so easily obtained. The Corvette had also aroused the passion of Harley Earl's successors in the design staff who had their own ideas about a fitting replacement for Earl's original Corvette. The design staff enjoyed a preeminent position within the corporation. Thanks to Earl's expressive postwar designs, appearance had become more important than engineering. Design provided the sizzle, often obscuring warmed-over underpinnings in the 1950s and 1960s.

Indeed, a race to control the future direction of the Corvette was shaping up between Chevy engineering and the design staff, and Zora was squarely on the front lines. His opponent would be Bill Mitchell, Earl's successor as vice-president of design. Like Earl, Mitchell was an iconoclast. Fiercely independent and opinionated, he lived and breathed fast machinery, be it jet airplanes, motorcycles, or automobiles. He was a commanding presence with his large round face, long sideburns, and bald crown.

Mitchell already had a design theme in mind for the next-generation Corvette. Back in 1957, he created a styling theme for the clay-model Q Corvette that was inspired by a series of Pininfarina and Boano bodies built on Italian Abarths, according to Karl Ludvigsen in his book Corvette: America's Star-Spangled Sports Car. Mitchell was particularly influenced by one record speed car that he had seen at the Turin motor show in 1957. The car had a wedge shape characterized by a sharp crease around its perimeter. Bulges were incorporated above the wheel wells to accommodate the tires within the relatively flat top shape of the car.

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Mitchell was so taken by the Abarth that he brought back photos of it from Italy and showed them to his key designers, who included Chuck Pohlmann, Tony Lapine, Pete Brock, and Bob Veryzer. According to Ludvigsen, Mitchell challenged each of them to try their own variations of the Abarth as a possible candidate to become the Q Corvette. Mitchell's team took this basic look and added a fastback roofline and an extreme wedge-shaped front end. For its time, the Q Corvette was a stunning new direction for Chevrolet's sports car. However, management considered it too costly to produce, owing to its novel powertrain and rear-mounted transmission, and it was canceled in 1958.

In 1959, Mitchell, now head of the GM design staff, had the opportunity to revive and expand upon the Q theme by creating a special race-car body. The body was designed by Pohlmann and Brock under Mitchell's direction and was engineered to fit over the chassis of Zora's SS mule car, which had been mothballed since GM pulled the racing plug in 1957. Mitchell decided to race the car to test public reaction to this revolutionary design theme. When it was all done, its sleek design suggested a graceful yet evil sea creature. Mitchell named it the Sting Ray even though it was a shark that had inspired it.

Duntov was nervous about the whole project for several reasons. Because of the corporate ban on racing, he had no control over the effort. This was strictly a private affair staffed by volunteer engineers and design staff personnel such as Larry Shinoda (whose distinguished career would eventually include the Camaro Z28 and the Boss 302 Mustang). Second, as a race car, the Sting Ray wasn't any more advanced than the original SS and suffered from many of the same problems, including bad brakes. Aerodynamically, it might have been worse than the SS, as the body actually created lift instead of downforce. Since the car's underpinnings were still his own design and he didn't want a project he had no connection with to come back and haunt him, Duntov tried to prevent Mitchell from obtaining the SS mule. More fundamentally, he didn't want Mitchell running a project-officially or unofficially-with the name Corvette attached to it. He was unsuccessful. As a General Motors vice-president, Mitchell simply had too much clout.

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Zora's fears were justified, not because the Sting Ray would be an embarrassment on the track for GM, but because of the momentum its success would create. The Sting Ray racer proved what a good car the SS actually was, for it was not only competitive but also a winner. The car propelled Dick Thompson to the Sports Car Club of America C-Modified National Championship in 1959. Thompson also won the same championship in 1960 before Mitchell retired the car to the auto-show circuit.

Buoyed by wild public enthusiasm for the design, Mitchell had Shinoda execute the adaptation of the Sting Ray into a production Corvette. This move set the mold for the second-generation Corvette to become a front-engined car, a fact that had Duntov fuming. He never liked the long-hooded look of the Sting Ray racer because it interfered with forward visibility. He had been frustrated with the efforts of Mitchell and his designers in trying to design a body for a mid-engined car back in the late 1950s. Both Lapine and Shinoda were assigned by Mitchell to work with Duntov on some early concepts, but their direction from Mitchell was to maintain a long hood. According to Duntov, the end result provided no indication that they were creating a mid-engined car: "I thought that external design should reflect what the car is." Accordingly, Duntov thought Mitchell's idea of car design was frozen in 1937 with the long hood of the Mercedes SS or Duesenberg J.

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The working prototype for the production Corvette was called the XP-720, which bore an immediate resemblance to the Sting Ray racer. Making matters worse for Zora was another design element added to the XP-720 that would become the trademark of the Sting Ray-a tapered fastback hardtop. It featured a wind split that ran down the center of the car in an uninterrupted line from the windshield to the rear deck.

Mitchell borrowed this concept from Harley Earl's Golden Rocket show car of 1956, which was built along the whimsical rocket/aviation theme expressed in such vehicles as the GM XP-500 and Firebird show cars. Mitchell's execution, to be sure, was far more aesthetically pleasing, but it still necessitated dividing the back window, which obscured rear visibility. When it was first designed, the split was narrower than in the actual production version. But the engineers widened it so they could get more structure into the glass seals. No matter how wide or narrow the split, for Zora such an intrusion into the driving function was an issue worthy of war.

So Duntov challenged Mitchell directly, venturing into the inner sanctum of GM Design to air his displeasure. He was on sacred ground. Never before had an engineer, especially one with so little authority on such a low-volume car line, had the audacity to blow smoke into the face of kings like Bill Mitchell.

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Duntov was out to shift the balance between styling and engineering back toward engineering. But he was one man on a limited-volume car line without a mandate from his superiors. He had his work cut out for him.

Duntov recalled looking at an early prototype of the XP-720 in the GM styling dome with Bill Mitchell. "We are sitting there, and Bill was squinting at the car and said, 'Ah, look at it. You see the blood, the blood streaming out of the mouth of the car-like big fish.'"

But blood was about to be spilled over the issue of the split window. " My blood," said Zora in a 1992 issue of Corvette Quarterly. Duntov hated the split window for the same reason he hated the long hood-it obstructed the driver's view.

Meadow Brook Hall concours founder and former GM stylist Dave Holls once said that Duntov's visit to the design department was "like a Lutheran visiting the Vatican." He was in a foreign place. Mitchell was aghast at the idea that an engineer would challenge him on his own turf, and as a result there were some serious words, even shouting. "Mitchell got very red-faced during these discussions," recalled Chuck Jordan, GM's design chief from 1986 through 1992, who witnessed many of the arguments.

"Mitchell would say, 'I'm the designer, and you're the engineer, and engineering never sold a goddamn thing,'" said Shinoda, who was also present for the discussions. "Knowing it pissed him off, Mitchell would call Duntov 'Zorro' or sometimes just a 'fucking white Russian.' Zora, in turn, called Mitchell 'a red-faced baboon.'"

Mitchell used whatever leverage he felt he could get away with, suggesting he could pull the plug on the independent rear suspension or other engineering goodies Duntov had in mind for the car. Whether Mitchell had the kind of corporate muscle to control the engineering content of the car was something Zora didn't want to find out. So Duntov took the matter to Ed Cole, then Chevrolet general manager. But Cole decided to compromise and let Mitchell have his split window for at least the first year.

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Duntov exacted a measure of revenge when it came to deciding who would be allowed to drive early Sting Ray prototypes from engineering. According to Ludvigsen, among those not on the list was Mitchell. And Mitchell's ego was big enough not to stand pat. So he built his own car, inspired by a shark he caught on vacation off Bimini. The new car was based on a 1962 chassis and was a successor to the XP-700 show car that first showcased the ducktail look.

Mitchell's new car, the XP-755 (later called the Mako Shark), featured the Sting Ray look but had a more overt shark theme with gills on the front quarter-panels and graded coloration ranging from a white underbody to a dark, iridescent blue on the hood and rear deck. Mitchell's Mako became one of the most popular and memorable of all the Corvette show cars. Ironically, the Mako Shark-designed as a convertible with a clear bubble top-never had a split window.

The split-window issue stuck in Duntov's craw long after the street Sting Ray went into production. He had taken his strongest stand on an issue since he had joined the corporation-and lost. Duntov earned the longer-term victory, however, and the split disappeared after the 1963 model year. What factors ultimately resulted in the decision are not documented, but Zora's opposition combined with scornful reviews from the enthusiast media may have been enough to kill it. Ironically, cost issues may have contributed to the demise of the split window as well, since it was cheaper to manufacture and install one rear window for the fastback rather than two.

Despite the controversy over the split window, the impact of the Sting Ray on the world market was nothing short of remarkable. The car literally stopped people in their tracks. Most historians agree that it was the best Corvette design ever, the standard by which any new design is measured. But not everyone in the design staff was convinced the Sting Ray was perfect. "I always thought the Sting Ray had too many phony scoops, especially compared with the beautiful E-type Jaguar," said Holls. "Mitchell told me to 'stop worrying about that fucking Jaguar.' He told me that Harley Earl taught him there should be entertainment everywhere you look around the car."

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Much to Zora's satisfaction, many 1963 Corvette owners removed the split window, replacing it with a solid piece of glass.

"After the big pissing contest, Zora was sort of banned from styling," said Shinoda. "When Zora did the Grand Sport [a special racing version of the Sting Ray] and he needed my help, he really couldn't ask. I would bootleg stuff out the back door."

Zora clashed again with Mitchell in 1966 and 1967 as the third-generation car was being developed. Zora once again preferred a mid-engine design, while Mitchell was pushing a production version of his Mako Shark II show car built on the same chassis as the 1963. Mitchell again won out.

Years later, at Duntov's retirement party in January 1975, Mitchell stayed away from any overt references to their famous run-ins over the 1963 split-window Sting Ray. Instead, he sought common ground with Zora, referencing the fact that the auto business had become overwrought with restrictions and regulations, which made Mitchell appreciate the value of Zora even more. "With all the restrictions we have today, we need some romance in the business. And thank God we have the Corvette, and thank God, Zora, you've put into the Corvette what made it go."

But Zora wanted to be known for more than making Mitchell's designs "go." And although Duntov had cast his own indelible mark on General Motors and the Corvette, the fact is he lost the war to Mitchell. Had Duntov been more successful, the look and configuration of the Corvettes we drive today-right or wrong-might have been considerably different.